Monday, November 12, 2012

First Hair Cut

Writing emails is quite the chore! But it's good to be back
at the internet cafe here in Chisinau telling you of my many mission
adventures!

This week was full of "firsts". I cut my hair by
myself, which surprisingly ended up looking not too bad! I finished my FIRST
transfer, and I attended my FIRST baptism of a little 9 year old girl in our
branch. It was a great experience to see how happy and excited she was to be
baptized. Oh yeah! We also had a big celebration of 15 years since the first
baptism here. They talked about how it all happened (which was really cool),
had a slideshow, and then we ate a lot of Moldovan food!

I also went on my fourth exchange, yes, my FOURTH... and
I've only been here for 6 weeks! I was with Elder Jones, who's been here for a
little over a year, and we had a lesson with Alex and Marina together. We
FINALLY got an actual lesson in with them, and it did not turn out very well.
We planned on talking about families and reading The Family: A Proclamation to
the World, but it ended up being kind of an argument between Alex and Elder
Jones... One of the biggest problems Alex has is: "why does God let bad
things happen to people?" Of course, a lot of people have this question in
mind, but the answer is: it's not God's fault... It's ours. Many times in the
scriptures God commands us to feed the poor, and clothe the naked; yet, there
are still homeless people, and very poor living conditions throughout the
world. So we tried explaining to him that God has put His trust in us to help
these people, and that it's not God that's letting this happen, it's us.

We worked on finding a lot more people to teach this week,
so hopefully all the appointments we have set up will reveal some great
investigators! By the way, I'm still with Elder Smith. They had some problems
with Visa papers, so until that gets fixed, we're still together! I'm loving every
minute with my companion, he's taught me a lot, and we get along very well.
Sorry for the short email this week, but I hope the pictures will suffice.